The Shoals, December 5. _Dearest Miss Delight_, _my own beloved twenty-seventh cousin_: Oh, why do you not come to see me? You thought you might come along in a week or two. It is more than a week or two and you are not here. I am having such fun, but it would be yet more fun if you were sharing it with me. I am selling things! Yes, selling them at the Mountain Industries. They are going like hot cakes. I haven’t made up my books yet, but from present indications I should say that the Mountain Industries would presently be very, very rich. Of course I’m really not a good judge, because this is the first selling I ever have done, and it may have excited me a bit. Let me tell you what I have been doing. As I mentioned in the little note I wrote you, things were rather at sixes and sevens here. Mrs. Kitchell, who has had charge of the place from the very beginning, was a fine worker and was and is one of the dearest little things that ever lived, but she wasn’t just the person for managing a growing business. She was better at weaving than at negotiating the weaving of other folk, for example. Actually, when I came to look things over I found quantities of fine saleable stuff tucked away here and there. No one ever had come in and demanded those particular things—not knowing of the existence of them—and they had therefore remained unsold. I had the whole “kit an’ bilin’” taken out in the yard and spread around on bushes and fences and the ground and aired and _aired_ and _aired_! Then I had the salesroom calcimined a most magnificent pumpkin color. The decorator was as stupid as a rabbit about mixing the right color, so Carin came over and did it. Then I had racks put around the wall. Some of them hung from the ceiling; some stood on the floor. Also I had a few drawers and shelves put up, and I got some show cases with black finishings, and I furnished the room with mountain furniture stained black. Also I have the floor covered with extra heavy rag carpeting in pumpkin yellow and black. Fancy, if you please, how beautiful my blue hand-woven coverlets and my brown-and-orange and black-and-red counterpanes look against this wall. Fancy how attractive is the snarl of fine hand-woven baskets that I have tied up on one side of the room.